Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

The Suffering Servant as Our Eternal High Priest

Throughout so-called Deutero-Isaiah, the Servant eschatologically fulfills the role of priestly and prophetic mediation, but also seems to be the Davidic Messiah spoken of earlier in Isaiah.  Earlier, Isaiah speaks of the Davidic Messiah as “a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch” (Isa. 11:1) and “root of Jesse who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire” (Isa. 11:10).  Parallel to this, the Servant of the later chapters of Isaiah is called a “shoot” coming “out of dry ground” (Isa. 53:2) and a “light to the nations” (Isa. 49:6). 

The Suffering Servant

Another parallel between the two figures is that the Davidic Messiah and the Servant are both described as redeemers and servants of YHWH.1  Indeed, like David prior to his enthronement, the Servant suffers before receiving glory.  Hence, it seems logical to think that Isaiah is speaking of the same figure when describing the Davidic Messiah and the Servant of the YHWH.    

It should also not go unnoticed that Isaiah’s Servant of YHWH takes on divine qualities as well.  As we have noted earlier, after having left during the Babylonian exile (Ezek. 10), Isaiah informs us that YHWH himself will return to Zion (Isa 40). The returning divine presence merges throughout the latter half of Isaiah with the Servant.  In this vein, the Servant is the luminous glory of the Lord in that he is a “light to the nations”(49:6). It cannot be denied that this description parallels the manifestation of the returning Kavod in Isaiah 40:5. Moreover, the Servant is also called the “arm of the Lord”(Isa. 53:1, 63:12), well as the divine “Angel of the presence” sent to save the people of God (Isa. 63:9).2  

Of course, many would object that much of Deutro-Isaiah seems to characterize God’s people as the Servant of the Lord (Ebed YHWH).  The post-biblical Jewish exegetical tradition has often argued that the sufferings of the Servant in Isaiah 53 are actually the sufferings of the group of Jews sent to Babylon.  In response to these claims, several things should be noted.  First, as Daniel Boyarin has noted, contrary to popular opinion, there is a real and not insignificant minority exegetical tradition in Judaism going up through the Middle Ages that sees the Servant not as God’s people but as the Messiah himself.3 

Secondly, there is some partial truth in the claim that the Servant is God’s people insofar as it cannot be denied that in certain passages the title of “Servant” is used to refer to Israel (Isa. 41:8).  Nevertheless, this is only because the Servant as a representative mediator embodies the destiny of Israel and humanity.  The most significant passages dealing with the Servant make clear that the person known as the Servant is an individual person standing over and against Israel and humanity.4 

The Eschatological High Priest

For example, in Isaiah 53 the Servant of the Lord is described as a righteous individual who has been designated by the Lord as one who will atone for sin.  In contrast to the righteous Servant, all of humanity has gone astray and succumbed to sin.  But the righteous Servant has not fallen into sin (Isa. 53:9) but rather is a sin offering for all of creation (Isa. 53:10).  In this, the Servant is a priest who also serves the role as victim.  Much like the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, he has been elected by God to represent others and serve as mediator: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11, emphasis added).  

Isaiah’s description of the Servant makes sense in light of the eschatology that he describes beginning in chapter 40.  Here he speaks of a new exodus whose logical corollary is a new Passover Lamb.  Within Isaiah’s prophesies, the Servant is this new Passover Lamb: “[he was] like a lamb that is led to the slaughter” (Isa. 53:7). Because of his redemptive sufferings, the Servant will be vindicated and be exalted by YHWH, seemingly to a heavenly throne (Isa. 53:12).  There is no direct talk of resurrection, but it is difficult to see how the Servant could be exalted and vindicated without conquering the death which he had to endure for the sins of the people. 

The exaltation of the Servant parallels that of the Melchizedekian priest-king of Psalm 110, along with the role of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16).  If the Holy of Holies represents the celestial heavens, the High Priest ascends to the heavens on the Day of Atonement.  He thereby makes intercession for sinners in the direct presence of the Lord: “he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12, emphasis added).5

The Eschatological Son of Man

Finally, throughout the Gospel tradition, Jesus portrays himself as the coming Son of Man of Daniel.  Contrary to the claims of Julius Wellhausen6 and Wilhelm Bousset,7 Jesus’s self-designation as the Son of Man is clearly not an invention of the later Palestinian community.  Paul and the authors of the other epistolary writings of the New Testament did not use the title “Son of Man” as a designation for Jesus, suggesting that it was not a title that the post-Easter community used and therefore the Gospel writers would have had little interest in putting into the mouth of Jesus.8 

Moreover, Jesus often speaks of himself as the Son of Man in the third person, which if read out of context creates a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether Jesus is speaking of himself or another person.  The later Christian community was in no sense ambivalent about Jesus’s identity and therefore would never have invented the somewhat ambiguous form that the Son of Man statements have come down to us in the Gospel tradition.9 

In Daniel the Son of Man is a heavenly priest-king (a parallel with Psalm 110 and Isaiah 53) who is exalted and vindicated at the eschaton. As king, he receives universal dominion over the nations (Dan. 7:14) in parallel to the description of the divine king of Psalm 2.  He also functions as a priestly figure since he rides on a cloud into the presence of God, that is, the “Ancient of Days” (Dan. 7:13), just as the High Priest moves into the presence of God on the Day of Atonement on a cloud of incense (Lev. 16:12).  The cloud which he rides is also reminiscent of the Kavod appearing on a cloud in Exodus (Exod. 16:10).  This therefore suggests that the Son of Man (who also appears similar to Ezekiel’s vision of the anthropic Kavod) is a manifestation of the divine Kavod.

The Son of Man as Simultaneously High Priest and Suffering Servant

If the Son of Man moves into the presence of God like the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, then it must only be logical to think that he has a blood offering to present before the divine throne (note that the Ark of the Covenant was also a throne, Isa. 36:16).  This atoning and intercessory ministry would make the Son of Man the same figure as Isaiah’s Servant who is exalted and makes intercession for sinners.10

This suggests that the Son of Man is not only a high priestly figure, but that he is the same person as the Servant who also offers up an eschatological sacrifice and will offer it before God in the heavenly court in order to make intercession for sinners.  As should be observed, there is another parallel with the prophesies of Daniel and the Servant of Isaiah.  At the time of eschatological judgment and redemption, we read in Daniel 9 that an “anointed one” (Messiah) will be “cut off” and will confirm a “covenant with many” (Dan. 9: 26-7).11 

The Danielic Son of Man’s role as priest very well may be the reason that both intertestamental literature (for example in 1 Enoch 61-2, 64, 4 Ezra 11-13, 2 Baruch 39).12 and the Gospels (Matt. 25) interpret this figure in Daniel as being a great cosmic judge.   It should be observed that the Son of Man is identified as a cosmic judge in the non-canonical literature of the intertestamental period and the Gospels, but not directly in the book of Daniel. 

In the Israelite cult established by the Pentateuch it was the role of the priest to serve as a judge and separate the pure from impure: “You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean” (Lev 10:10, also see 11:47).  This discernment and separation of the pure and impure would seem to prefigure the cosmic judgment made by the Son of Man separating the just from the wicked at the end of days (Matt. 25).

Theanthropic Priest-King and Cosmic Judge

Hence, in designating himself the Son of Man, Jesus claimed to be the theanthropic priest-king and cosmic judge.  From the perspective of his original Jewish audience, the oddity of Jesus’s claim was that the Son of Man was supposed arrive at the time of the general resurrection to judge the living and the dead.  In a word, the Son of Man was not a figure who was supposed to appear before the eschaton, or even in anticipation of it.  It therefore follows that Jesus’s claim to be the Son of Man was paradoxically a matter of bringing the end of time before the end of time. 

In being forgiven by Jesus, sinners could suffer the verdict that Jesus would render at the end of days ahead of time.  Jesus’s act of forgiveness was more often than not accompanied by communal meals where his presence with sinners assured them of his fellowship, grace, and personal solidarity.  In a sense, such meals and Jesus’s power of forgiveness stood in competition with the Temple ministry and represented the creation of a new Temple, namely his person (Jn. 1:14, Jn. 2:21) and the eschatological community as an extension of his person (1 Cor. 3:16-17, 1 Cor. 6:19-20, 1 Cor. 12:27, Eph. 2:20-22, Col. 1:18,1 Pt. 2:4-9). 

Our reading of Jesus’s ministry of reconciliation suggests a combination of the “realized eschatology” of the interpretation found in C.H. Dodd13 as well as the “consistent eschatology” found in the interpretation of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer.14  These two forms of eschatology therefore are both present in the Gospel tradition and should be seen as complementary to one another. 

  1. Gerard Van Groningen, Messianic Revelation in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishers, 1990), 646-647. ↩︎
  2. Note that this is one reading.  The LXX version states “not an ambassador, nor an angel, but he himself [God] saved them.”  See discussion in Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology, 116-119.  Also see Michel Barnes, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” 4.  Online: http://www.mu.edu/maqom/spiritus.pdf.  Barnes noes that the rabbinical interpreters treated the two readings as if they were identical. ↩︎
  3. Boyarn, The Jewish Gospels, 150—155. ↩︎
  4. Van Groningen, Messianic Revelation in the Old Testament, 629. ↩︎
  5. Ibid., 630-2. ↩︎
  6. Julius Wellhausen, “Des Menschen Sohn,” in Skizzen und Vorarbeiten (Berlin: Druck und Verlag Georg Reimer,1899), 187-215. ↩︎
  7. Bousset, Kyrios Christus, 35-39. ↩︎
  8. See similar argument in: Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009), 202. ↩︎
  9. See similar argument in: Gerald O’Collins, Christology, A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64-65. ↩︎
  10. Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis, “The High Priest as Divine Mediator in the Hebrew Bible: Daniel 7:13 as a Test Case,” Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers (1997): 169-174. ↩︎
  11. Van Groningen, 836-8; Carl Keil, Biblical Commentary on Daniel (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1955), 360-2; Steinmann, Daniel, 474-6.  Also see Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 51-62. ↩︎
  12. For discussion of the meaning of the title see the following: Delbert Burkett, The Son of Man: A History and Evaluation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1999);  Joseph Fitzmyer, “The New Testament Title ‘Son of Man’,” in A Wandering Aramean: A Collected Aramaic Essays (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1999), 143-60;   Charles Gieschen, “The Name of the Son of Man in 1 Enoch,” in Enoch and Messiah Son of Man: Revisiting the Book of Parables, ed. Gabriele Boccaccini, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007), 238-249;  Douglas Hare, The Son of Man Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990). ↩︎
  13. C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961). ↩︎
  14. See: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1966), 223-397; Johannes Weiss, Jesus’s Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. and eds. David Larrimore Holland and Richard H. Hiers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from: “Divine Service for the Seventh Sunday of Easter,” Christ Lutheran Church, Jackson, Mississippi, May 21, 2023, accessed March 28, 2025, https://christlutheranjacksonms.org/divine-service-for-the-seventh-sunday-of-easter-3/. Other images from: Albrecht Dürer, “The Man of Sorrows.,” Title-page to Small Passion., c. 1511. Christ on the Cross with Saints Vincent Ferrer, John the Baptist, Mark and Antoninus, by Master of Fiesole Epiphany © LA County Museum of Art.

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